A recurring theme in how AI is landing in film - underlined by a McKinsey explainer covered this summer - is that the real changes are not happening in front of the camera. They are happening in the unglamorous, labour-intensive stages that surround the shoot: script breakdowns, dailies logging, footage search and localisation.
Upstream, not on set
For working crew the takeaway is that the set itself does not change much in 2026 - what changes is that the data around it gets captured, tagged and organised far more automatically. That matches what I argued about the A24 and Google DeepMind deal: AI lands upstream, in the workflow, before it ever touches the frame.
Why this is the interesting part for the art department
Script breakdown is exactly where the art department's work begins. If breakdowns and asset tracking get faster and more reliable, the graphic and prop items in a scene get flagged earlier, and prep starts on firmer ground. It is the reason I built Skenic - to take the friction out of the breakdown, scene by scene, rather than automate the design itself. The design still belongs to a person; the tooling just gets the right questions asked sooner.
Source: ProductionHub.